Amazon has never reserved onboard memory on a Kindle for Amazon purchased materials, to my knowledge. If you wanted to “sideload” a few audiobooks on there, books from Baen, your own music…you could fill up the memory.

Barnes & Noble is limiting how you use your local “hard drive”…we aren’t talking about the cloud here.

That sounded odd to me, so I asked someone at Barnes & Noble. I chatted with someone…while I was given a human name, I got a lot of canned responses…enough to make me suspect I was speaking with a database, although I don’t know that.

I got the exact same response twice…to two different questions.

Here’s an excerpt from the conversation:

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13:20:24 : Paul: My name is Paul, Thank you for joining Barnes & Noble chat. How are you doing today? How may I help you?

13:20:30 : : Sure. The new NOOK Tablet says: “Approximately 13GB available to store content, of which up to 12GB may be reserved for content purchased from the Barnes & Noble NOOK Store.” So, if I have 2GBs of personal files, I can not put them on the NOOK Tablet, correct?

13:20:37 : : Hi, Paul! :)

13:21:06 : Paul: NOOK Tablet has 16GB of built-in memory lets you hold up to 10,000 books. You can add up to 32GB memory to your device with a microSD memory card.

13:21:11 : Paul: The actual formatted capacity may be less. Approximately 13GB available to store content, of which up to 12GB may be reserved for content purchased from the Barnes & Noble NOOK Store.

13:21:39 : : Yes, correct. So that means there is only 1 GB for material not purchased from the NOOK store, right?

13:22:46 : Paul: Yes, for the Personal sideload files.

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I went on to ask about NOOK cloud storage.

The answer was clear: no personal document storage in the NOOK cloud.

Amazon gives you 5GBs free just for personal document storage for your Kindles.

That makes it 11GB possible for the Kindle, 1GB for the NOOK Tablet for personal documents.

I’d call that “crushing”. ;)

They both appear to give you unlimited cloud storage purchased from their respective stores.

Now, does that make the memory always better for the Fire?

Nope.

If you were going on a cruise, for example, and you were going to be away from wi-fi and a computer for a long time, you might want to carry a lot of information with you…and the NOOK tablet would give you that SD card in addition to the onboard storage.

If you brought a laptop with you, in addition to your Fire, you could sideload from that…using it like that SD card.

That’s nowhere near as convenient, though.

Still, the Kindle Fire gives you more storage for your personal stuff than the NOOK tablet does…but I don’t think you’ll hear that much.

Thanks to Becca for commenting on a previous post and nudging me along, and to D. Andersen in the Amazon Kindle community for bringing up the cruise example.

I still cannot derive what utility is conferred by the ‘loop’ on the corner of NC, and now, NT.

It’s also unclear what utility there is in streaming 720p HD content to a device that is physically incapable of displaying it.

Personally I think the whole storage debate is of the apples-and-oranges variety. Each device has its merits when it comes to ‘personal’ content.

I am concerned that Fire’s local storage is too limited. It’s clearly not much if you plan to have video or music for offline viewing. Apart from that, it’s probably adequate—provided streaming is supported for personal content in cloud storage—but if one plans to go crazy with applications, 6GB is pretty tight (I have 5.2GB of apps on my iPod Touch, and that’s pared down considerably from what I’ve purchased over the year I’ve had it). Apps cannot be ‘streamed’.

I just realized what the loop is for: to keep Apple from suing like they are suing Samsung. Nobody could accuse B&N of stealing the design from Apple (because Apple wouldn’t incorporate such silly design touches).

The problem with archiving apps is that your settings (e.g. high scores etc.) get deleted also: you are essentially uninstalling them. Most apps are in the 10-20MB range but I’ve had some as large as 500MB.

But we’ll have to wait and see what Fire is like.

I’m not sure I will actually use Fire that much (I have a Xoom which is much more of a full tablet), but am interested in playing with Silk, as well as a full implementation of KF8, and can justify it on that basis.

now – can you get an answer as to whether it’s a brick unless it’s registered to B&N with an active credit card? Because I know you can use the Kindle unregistered, just not have full capabilities. This makes a difference to me in giving an ereader to a child that I don’t want to have unlimited access to an on-line credit card.

1. It’s not going to be necessary for most people. The onboard memory can hold (at the same time): 80 apps; 5 movies; 200 songs; and 1,500 books. That should last most people until they gat back to wi-fi

2. It raises the initial cost of the device, and Amazon was clearly trying hard to get it under $200

3. It increases the vulnerability of the device…more systems, more problems. The SD card on the Kindle 1 was apparently a problem

4. It increases the fragility of the device (more doors, less structural integrity)

5. It doesn’t help in moving people to the cloud…and more dependancy on Amazon

6. Some NOOK Tablet users may not be happy when they find out they only have 1GB onboard for sideloads…and that the 32GB SD card will cost them something like $40